MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND ART. 



THE HELIOTROPE, OR PILGRIM IN PURSUIT OF HEALTH. LONDON : 



LONGMAN AND Co. 



OUR readers will agree with us, that he is a bold man, who, in times so 

 unpropitious to the muse, attempts to travel in the track of Byron. And 

 yet here is a poet who has done so, if not with entire success, at least with- 

 out incurring any thing like the disgrace of failure. The construction of 

 the poem before us, and that of Childe Harold, are nearly identical. Both 

 are descriptive of the most remarkable scenes and objects that meet the pil- 

 grim's eye, interspersed with such reflections as they may suggest. Our 

 author is never tame, and he occasionally rises into considerable elevation 

 of style and sentiment. 



A SYSTEM or GEOGRAPHY, ON A NEW AND EASY PLAN. FOURTEENTH 

 EDITION. BY THOMAS ERVING, EDINBURGH : OLIVER AND BOYD. 

 LONDON : SIMPKIN AND MARSHALL. 



ALL the world, now-a-days, pretend to understand geography, and every 

 literary aspirant thinks himself qualified to write upon this science. Yet, to 

 succeed, he must be a mathematician and astronomer be well grounded not 

 only in the history of his own country but of every other possess sound 

 ideas upon politics and commerce ; upon physics and natural history ; and be 

 able to compare, " en philosophe," the manners and customs of the various 

 nations on our globe. Such is geography, a science so vast that it embraces 

 the whole circle of human knowledge; and yet, judging from the numbers of 

 w r orks that the press almost monthly brings forth, nothing it would appear is 

 more easy than to write an elementary treatise on this science. But with a 

 few honourable exceptions these treatises have become the j>rey of writers who 

 know nothing of geography ; they are all cast in the same mould, display the 

 same ignorance of facts and absence of just criticism, andare> in fact, nothing 

 more than modifications of old works, with the addition of scraps of recent 

 travels, and of figures copied, " au hazard," from the journals of the day. 

 Yet this chaos of heterogeneous materials, this monstrous admixture of truth 

 and falsehood, this- tesselated work of contemporary things and of things 

 that existed centuries ago, is put into the hands of the students as a lumi- 

 nous source of geographical science. 



These remarks, we are sorry to say, apply to the work before us. It 

 abounds with -errors. We pass over the statistical blunders as from the dif- - 

 ficulty of gairiing access to legitimate resources of information, particularly 

 in the despotic governments; we must often times rest satisfied with ap- 

 proximate details. But the case is different with political -geography. We 

 shall cite one glaring inaccuracy as a proof of the ignorance or the careless- 

 ness of the compiler. Under the head of the Argentine republic (Buenos 

 Ayres), he says, " Monte Video, formerly the capital of Rio Grande, is now 

 an independent republic." This would provoke a smile at the Brazilian and 

 Buenos Ayrean Legations. Monte Video never formed part of the province 

 of Rio Grande of which Porto Alegre is the capital, but when annexed 

 to Brazil was the capital of a distant province Cisplatina, now the republic 

 of the Banda Oriental del Uraguay. 



MEMOIRS OF SILVIO PELLICO, TRANSLATED ifc THOMAS ROSCOE. 

 LONDON : WHITTAKER AND Co. 



HERE is another victim of the Holy Alliance, of that Machiavelian system 

 that delivered over the north of Italy to the surveillance of an Austrian 

 police a police that, Proteus-like, assumes every form the domino of the 

 masquerade-the tonsure of the priest-the moustache of the soldier-the 



